50 See the world with Insight! he world's leading full-color travel guides are now available in three information-packed formats: Insight Guides, Insight Pocket Guides (with pull-out maps) and the new Insight Compact Guides. 300 different titles available at bookstore nationwide. "" Houghton Mifflin Free Catalog One piece from our new collection of carefully designed and handcrafted solid wood furniture of the finest cherry, mahogany or quarter sawn oak. Fully assembled and beautifully finished Also available as precision-cut kits. Share with us in the experience of ItJJ creating an heirloom. Updated ....... ..  .......... classics by... Wood ClassiCs Box 95Y4310. Gardiner. NY 12525 (914) 255-5651 Enjoy our free winter catalog & '96 . calendar full of Martha's Vineyard's "° { t TM best stuff. Hats, sweatshirts, vests, '  1 boxers, china, toys, biscotti, cookie tins, bread mixes and new recipes from: $% ..., The Black Dog Tavern Co. • P.O. Box 2219N Vineyard Haven MA 02568 • (800) 626-1991 PASSING THE BUCK DEPT. THE 5UPEI NOTE near-perfect counteCeit hundred-dollar bill is coming out of the Middle East Is it an act of economic terrorisrngAnd can the Treasury st@ it? BY FREDRIC DANNEN AND IRA 51LVEIMAN N the spring of 1992, two Lebanese- born drug traffickers found them- selves in jail in Massachusetts, and their prospects looked grim. Gebran Hanna, of Ottawa, and Peter Kattar, of Andover, Massachusetts, had shipped more than three tons of hashish, con- cealed in plastic barrels of olives, from the Bekaa Valley, in Lebanon, to Boston Harbor, and they were caught. If they were convicted, they would likely face manda- tory sentences of thirty years or more. Their only hope for clemency was to co6perate with the government of the United States, and provide useful infor- mation. As it happened, they knew about something big. Hanna was escorted to the office of Paul Kelly, the Boston federal prosecutor who had brought the hashish case. After Kelly, a slim blond man in his thirties, and an agent of the United States Customs Service interrogated him about the drag business, Hanna suddenly changed the subject. Was the government interested in leam- ing about a counterfeit United States hundred-dollar bill of re- markable quality being printed in Lebanon? Hanna said he had inside knowledge of the operation, and offered to direct his brother, who lived in Ottawa, to travel to Beirut and obtain samples. Kelly was skeptical but interested. "We said 'Fine. Do that,'" he 'recalls. As had been ar- ranged, the brother stopped at Logan Airport on his way back from Lebanon, and there he met the customs agent and turned over five bills. Kelly was stunned when the bills were presented to him. Two of them did not appear to be fraudulent. "I've done coun- terfeiting cases, and I know what a coun- terfeit bill looks like," he says. "These bills looked genuine. They felt genuine. I said, 'If these are counterfeit, this is a serious problem for the United States.'" Kelly immediately called the Boston office of the United States Secret Service, a branch of the Treasury. "I said, 'We have some outstanding-looking bills, and they came from Lebanon,' "he recalls. "Secret Service "" , ," -% Z "1,," "'. -.- ,6.>-- , I ' .-."  , . , ' -  I ," " ,,.._. . ,Na " : ... =, .... .-- ,: . : , . The Supemote: Sinlarlypoisd to damage orld mdenm in the dollar? was at our door in three and a half min- utes. They knew exactly what I was talk- ing about." Kelly, it turned out, had obtained samples of a counterfeit hundred-dollar bill that had been dubbed the Supernote. It had surfaced around 1990 and origi- nated in the Middle East, and, the agents told Kelly, as far as they could deter- mine between two and three billion dol- < lars' worth had been printed in two years. 7 It was indeed no ordinary counterfeit.  Most fake currency is printed on an offset z<